In the
early morning when I get up and glance underneath the curtains of my bedroom
window, I see the sunlight already invading the landscape.
What woke
me was the barking of the farmers dog. The farmer is my neighbor. Well, that is
to say, he lives in the farm more than a hundred meters away from my little
house on the French countryside.
His home is
an old house, built as they used to do in Burgundy, with all kinds of bricks,
roof tiles, cement, grey and red stones.
Around it
fly the pigeons, wander a couple of ducks, he has a few rabbits and of course
chicken. In the stable you will find 5 cows, aging, but still giving a lot of
milk. And every day by sunrise, the farmer lets his cows out in the meadow. And
every evening by sunset he walks them back inside, accompanied by his loyal dog
that follows him everywhere he goes.
The
farmhouse does not have more than a single tl-bar of light in the kitchen, a
table with 4 chairs, a refrigerator dated a long time ago but still working and
a woodstove.
He will
always welcome you to sit at his kitchen table on his wooden chairs to join him
for a drink of Pastis and to listen to his stories, told in this hard to
understand Bressan dialect but filled with history.
Of course
he has his own vegetable garden and no matter how warm the sun might shine on
his bold head, you can find him there most of the time, doing this very heavy
work to keep the soil fertile and free of weeds.
When the
sun starts to sink and the temperatures are lowering a bit, he gets on his
tractor and slowly follows the small path to his corn field to spend a couple
of hours doing what a farmer needs to do on his land.
Every
Monday morning he takes his old Peugeot car out of the old barn and disappears
to the market, to come back a couple of hours later with a box of new bought
chicken, some fresh vegetables he does not grow himself in his little garden
and a bottle of house-wine.
On
Wednesday he does his laundry and clean shirts and pants are hanging over the
barbed wired fence around his property.
Finally,
just before dark, the light goes out in the farmhouse and after a hard day of
working, the farmer will call it a day and goes to bed.
And this
repeats itself every day of the week. And when you meet him, he is always so
cheerful and positive, so full of life and warm hearted.
He is the
ultimate proof that happiness has nothing to do with possessing a lot or living
a luxury life. His happiness exists in the simple things of life and his
simplicity is the greatest richness a man can have.
With love,
Esmeralda
